Abstract:
A one-hour awareness-raising breakfast meeting is a unique and free opportunity for businesses looking for engineering solutions.

Laser Micromachining centre offers unique opportunity for businesses

UK | Posted on June 23rd, 2007

The wide-ranging benefits of laser micromachining make it an especially effective tool for product development and prototyping stages of production. Design imagination coupled with laser micromachining flexibility ensure new ideas and concepts can be rapidly evaluated. Companies that seize the opportunity to use the latest technology will be those that retain and improve their market share increasing pressure on businesses to adopt and exploit the very latest small-scale engineering techniques. The challenge, of course, is how to achieve this within existing resources. Not every venture has the technology expertise in-house; few organizations have the resources to research, develop and then prototype new products before committing to volume production.

Often many versions of parts can be made within a single day reducing laborious design stages and allowing product refinements to be made cost-effectively. Companies refining existing product designs to provide extended technical capabilities have found these features of laser micromachining particularly useful. A practical example of how laser micromachining can improve manufacturing is a filter product which contains a thin metal foil with a mesh of 0.5mm wide struts (pictured above).

Laser micromachining is regarded as the new manufacturing method that can not only produce the new design but can also streamline the assembly process. Since laser micromachining is a non-contact process, the metal foil could be pre-mounted in its holder before the mesh was machined in situ. This improved not only the product specification but also the production yield since no handling of the delicate foil was required after it had been machined. This process development route typifies the benefits which the uses of laser processing brings to manufacturing problems.

Dr. Nadeem Rizvi of the UK Laser Micromachining Centre will present on the business opportunities that laser micromachining can offer in product development and manufacture. Dr. Rizvi will focus on the benefits of laser micromachining for various applications. The characteristics of the main types of lasers which are used for producing micro and nano scale features will be highlighted. The talk will provide examples (including videos) of high precision laser micromachining and offer a view on upcoming developments. A brief practical guide will be provided to some of the major issues in laser micromachining: laser ablation; optics and processing methods; materials issues; processing parameters.

This free event will take place in Cardiff on July 4, 2007, and will precede a one-day workshop on ‘Laser Microprocessing of Challenging Materials and Architectures' which attendees may stay on to participate in. The meeting is supported by the Welsh Assembly Government's Knowledge Exploitation Fund to promote the training and life long learning available from the MNT Academy.

About UK Laser Micromachining CentreThe UK Laser Micromachining Centre is part of the XGEN enterprise which has been established as a one-stop-shop resource to take businesses into the next generation. If you’re looking to stay ahead of your competitors and find out how your business can benefit make sure you don’t miss this insight into laser micromachining.